“Men Cast a Net for Her,” the cover promises.Ī decade later, women apparently dreamed of romance amid danger. “Virgin With Butterflies” (1949) shows a brunet in thigh-high stockings encircled by five male heads sprouting butterfly wings. The earliest covers draw from film noir and are rife with - in hindsight - unintentional comedy. Inside a small room is a chronology of representations of desire. It could be mistaken for a Harlequin cover. Visitors walk through a doorway next to one of Paris’ signature advertising photos: a couple lustily embracing on an elevator, the man reaching for the “stop” button. “The Heart of a Woman” exhibit is just off the casino floor, between La Reception and Les Toilettes. “We’ll have beefy men there,” said Dawn Rawle, a Harrah’s vice president.
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The cover-art display is the first in a planned string of tie-ins between Harlequin and Harrah’s Entertainment, which owns Paris, including an upcoming book signing with an author of western romances. (Among the links on the hotel’s website: “Between the Sheets” and “Up All Night.”)
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Michelle Renaud, a Harlequin spokeswoman, stayed at the Paris Las Vegas during a licensing convention and marveled at how its marketing mirrored Harlequin’s. It was an appropriate landing spot: Both the publishing company and the Strip trade on decadent fantasy. The exhibit - a mix of dozens of book covers and detailed paintings - ended up in Sin City after a stint at a New York gallery. “These works were part of a larger zeitgeist.” Because Harlequin markets the books to such a large audience, “they had to have their pulse on women’s desires.” “I don’t think anybody sat back and thought it out,” Semmelhack said. Their paramours were relegated to the background, if they appeared at all.
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In the mid-'60s, Harlequin covers shifted to tight portraits of resolute-looking women. The second wave of feminism, with its focus on workplace equality and reproductive rights, was still years from peaking.
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And the heroines it depicted lived out female professional - not necessarily sexual - fantasies long before they became reality.įor example, the covers of doctor-nurse romances of the ‘50s and ‘60s showed workplace lovers chatting as equals, which might be linked (as another placard tells us) to the frustration of women who “felt sequestered in the domestic realm of postwar suburbia.” In exotic-locale tales of about the same period, women were the doctors, though only in foreign and often tropical destinations.
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She came to two conclusions: The artwork, which had the richness of movie stills, was of higher-than-expected caliber. Her job: to judge the books solely by their covers. Semmelhack, who was no reader of romances, pored over a trove of original Harlequin paintings.